Abstract
Context
Karl Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) was a central member of the Frühromantiker (“early romantics”), a group of avant-garde poets, literary theorists, and scholars who gathered in Berlin and Jena in the second half of the 1790s. The Jena group included the poets Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Friedrich Hölderlin. While nineteenth-century romanticism was to become a conservative and backward-looking movement, a “counter-Enlightenment”, privileging tradition and religion over modernity and a sense of “progress”—it was, in its early phases, marked generally by a politically and culturally progressivist outlook and an experimentalist literary and aesthetic practice.
Romanticism in its early phases was not marked by the type of excessive emotionalism and rejection of rationalism with which it is commonly associated. The Frühromantiker had in fact been deeply engaged with the idealist philosophies of Kant, Reinhold and Fichte and developed distinctive points of view, especially aesthetic ones, within the emerging idealist form of philosophy.
Together with his brother, the philologist and literary theorist August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel had edited and contributed to the Athenäum between 1798 and 1800. This was the main organ of early romantic aesthetics. Here and elsewhere, often in fragmentary aphorisms, he developed his distinctive philosophical theory of the nature of modern “romantic” literature (as he christened it) and valorised the role of “irony” in modern thought.
Schelling too went to Jena, where he came into close contact with the circle around the Schlegels. Later Hegel was to join Schelling in Jena. By then Schelling had been appointed to a chair of philosophy. At first Schelling had seen himself as simply developing the views of Fichte’s idealism by augmenting Fichte’s more subjectivistic version of transcendental idealism with a philosophy of nature inspired by Plato and Spinoza. After Hegel joined him at Jena in 1801, however, Schelling became more critical of Fichte. For a few years, Hegel and Schelling worked closely together, during which time Schelling developed his “identity philosophy”, an attempt to combine transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature.
The intellectual relations between Schelling, Hegel and the various Frühromantiker are complex and controversial. Schelling was more closely associated than Hegel with the Schlegel circle, and Schelling is most commonly thought of as the most philosophical representative of romanticism. Hegel was to become very critical of romanticism, which he particularly identified with the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, but had, nevertheless, been clearly influenced by Schelling.
By 1803 Hegel’s relationship with Schelling was starting to sour, and soon Hegel was clearly demarcating his philosophy from that of Schelling. In turn, Schelling later became critical of both Hegel and Schelling’s own earlier philosophy. By the first years of the new century, the Frühromantiker circle at Jena started to break up. Fichte had been driven out of Jena in 1799; Novalis had died in 1801. Friedrich Schlegel gradually became more socially and politically conservative, in 1808 converting to Catholicism. Hegel was later to take this as a symptom of the unsustainability of his initial “ironism”.
Jena: Idealism and Romanticism
Jena Idealism here refers to overlapping developments: Fichte’s subjective idealism, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and identity philosophy, and the Romantic emphasis on creativity, synthesis, and the Absolute as a living, dynamic unity. Schlegel’s Romantic view of art and irony presents the infinite (the Absolute) as dynamically revealed through finite works. This resonates with Schelling’s project of reconciling nature and spirit. Both see the Absolute as developmental and self-revealing rather than static.
Schlegel’s aesthetic of irony and fragmentariness in the review Athenäum parallels the idealist dialectic. This is a Hegelian process of opposing moments ending in a higher synthesis.
Romantic historicism and philosophy of history in Schlegel—where culture, language, and art develop in organic ways—align with idealist accounts of historical self-realisation of spirit.
Schlegel treated poetry as a privileged access to truth and the Absolute through symbolic, generative language. This complements Schelling’s later emphasis on the poetic and artistic as disclosure of the Absolute and Fichte’s view of self-positing subjectivity.
Schlegel and the Romantics opposed cold systematic metaphysics. Their preference for fragment, aphorism, and irony challenged the purely systematic grand metaphysics of some idealists, yet they shared idealist assumptions about mind, freedom, and the primacy of spirit over mere matter.
However, there were tensions between the Idealists and Romantics. Fichte and Schelling aimed at systematic philosophical accounts (self-positing I, identity of subject and object). Schlegel distrusted totalising systems, favouring poetic fragmentation and open-ended inquiry.
The Idealists emphasised rigorous philosophical argument. Schlegel used literary forms (fragments, essays, aphorisms), making his approach more aesthetic and less strictly philosophical. Schlegel’s later conversion to Catholicism and his interest in medieval Christianity introduced doctrinal commitments that diverged from the more metaphysical, secular tendencies in Jena Idealism.
Schlegel helped bridge Romantic aesthetics and German Idealism. His ideas about language, irony, and creative synthesis influenced Schelling and others and provided Romantic counterpoints to purely systematic idealist thought. The exchange at Jena shaped both movements: Romantics radicalised idealist insights about subjectivity and the Absolute into aesthetic and linguistic terms; Idealists sharpened philosophical defences of the Romantic intuitions about unity, nature, and freedom.
Commentary
The Athenäum (Athenaeum) was the central journal of the Jena Romantics—a short-lived but highly influential serial that shaped German Romantic theory and helped define “Romanticism.” Founded in 1798 in Jena by Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel and collaborators, it was published from 1798 to 1800 (two volumes, various issues and fragments later collected). Its format was as a “journal” of essays, aphorisms, fragments, reviews, and poetic pieces which served as a forum for the Jena circle’s ideas.
The publication articulated the Romantics’ programme, a synthesis of poetry and philosophy, the creative role of irony, the fragment as a poetic form, and the valorisation of imaginative subjectivity. It rejected the Enlightenment’s insistence on system, utility, and fixed categories, promoting ambiguity, irony, organic unity, and historical development. It treated poetry as a mode of knowledge (symbolic, generative language) rather than ornament.
The key contributions and concepts of Athenäum material were: the fragment, elevated as a deliberate literary form that gestures to the infinite and preserves tension between completion and openness; irony, especially Romantic irony—self-reflective, self-undermining creativity that both produces and questions its work; the idea that poetry can integrate all arts and sciences—an ideal of totalising poetic activity without reductive system-building; interest in philology, medievalism, and the historic development of culture and language as sources for poetic renewal; blurring boundaries between genres (poetry, philosophy, criticism, drama).
Fragments
The 1798 Athenäum marks the founding moment of early German Romanticism and is anchored by Friedrich Schlegel’s celebrated Athenäum Fragments. Issued in the journal he co-edited with his brother in Jena, these compressed aphorisms and short essays lay out a new poetics that dissolves firm boundaries between literature, philosophy, criticism, and life. Rather than proposing a closed system, the collection advances an open-ended programme: poetry and thought should be in perpetual becoming, receptive to contradiction, self-reflection, and experiment.
The main Athenäum fragments (primarily by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel) articulate the Jena Romantics’ programme: they elevate the fragment as a deliberate literary form that signals infinity through incompletion, arguing that poetic truth is best approached by aphorism, paradox, and self-contradiction rather than by closed systematic reason. They theorise Romantic irony as a reflective, self-consuming creative freedom that both generates and critiques its products, making the poet at once creator and critic; they advance the ideal of “universal poetry,” a reintegrative art that would synthesise poetry, philosophy, history, and the sciences into an organic whole while preserving the play of parts, and they stress the historical, philological, and medieval sources for poetic renewal against Enlightenment emphasis on utility and abstract rules.
They treat language as a living, symbolic force—poetry is cognitive, revealing the Absolute through metaphor and symbol—so that criticism, translation, and comparative philology become creative acts, not merely descriptive.
The fragments also blur genres, intermixing reviews, essays, maxims, and poems to enact their theory, and they emphasise the artist’s role in cultural Bildung, the cultivation of taste, and the progression of spirit through epochs, all while preferring open-endedness, irony, and playful contradiction over doctrinal closure. Finally, the Athenäum fragments influenced later aesthetics by valorising the fragmentary, the dialogic, and the poeticisation of philosophy, even as they provoked tensions with contemporaneous idealist drives toward systematic unity.
The number of Athenäum fragments varies by edition because editors collect and number fragments differently. Most critical editions present roughly 200–240 fragments.
Some short examples (one-line or two-line fragments and aphorisms) typical of the Athenäum material:
“Irony is the infinite within the finite; the poet must be both creator and critic of his own work.”
“The fragment is the highest artistic form — it points beyond itself to the infinite.”
“Universal poetry unites all arts and sciences into one living language.”
“Every true poem is a philosophy that has become sensuous.”
“Translation is the most intimate of all arts: it is itself original creation.”
“Taste is the judgment of the soul’s formative power; criticism is a second poetry.”
“Romantic art seeks organic unity, not mechanical system; it grows like a life.”
The last fragment paraphrases Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenäum idea that art should develop organically rather than be imposed as a closed, mechanical system.
In the long term Athenäum influenced later Romantic movements: literary modernism (fragmentary aesthetics, irony), theories of the fragment, and the role of poetic language in philosophy (affecting Schelling, later German idealists and literary theory).
Themes
Philosophy and the Self
Engaging post-Kantian philosophy, Schlegel reimagines aesthetic activity as a site where freedom and form meet. The self is not a finished essence but an activity of becoming. Transcendental poetry is art conscious of this process, presenting its own genesis as part of the work. Hence the premium on process, experiment, and the visible trace of composition.
In a good poem, as in reality, everything seems capricious and instinctive, though it is in fact necessary and deliberate. So, too, the Romantic artist must combine deadly seriousness with playfulness in a "constant self-parody," as Schlegel puts it. The model here is Socratic irony, a sense of the limitlessness of things and one's own limited capacity to express them, combined with the necessity of doing so.
The Absolute
German Idealism and German Romanticism converge on the notion of an all-encompassing ground or Absolute but diverge sharply in how it is conceived and approached. Idealists such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel treat the Absolute as an ontological and systematic unity that explains the relation of subject and object: Fichte makes it the self-positing activity of the I. Schelling conceives it as an original identity from which nature and spirit unfold, moving from a formative, sometimes “dark” ground toward conscious freedom. Hegel understands it as self-developing Spirit whose contradictions are resolved historically in a rational totality.
By contrast, German Romantics like Schlegel and Novalis present the Absolute as an aesthetic and regulative ideal—an infinite, poetic unity approached through imagination, irony, fragmentary forms, and symbolic mediation, rather than captured in a closed philosophical system. Where Idealism favours systematic demonstration and historical dialectic to realise or know the Absolute, Romanticism privileges open-ended creativity, myth, and the play of opposites that preserve possibility instead of producing final synthesis.
Yet the two currents overlap and influence each other (early Schelling and Novalis, for example, blend metaphysical ambition with poetic modes), so the Absolute in this period can appear both as a metaphysical origin and as an inexhaustible aesthetic aim.
German Romanticism and philosophy
German Romanticism began as a response to Enlightenment faith in pure reason and to Kant’s limits on what reason can know. Romantics accepted that reason has limits but went further, saying feeling, imagination, and personal experience also reveal truth. Imagination was seen as a creative power that shapes understanding, and emotions and intuition mattered as ways of knowing. They viewed nature as an organic, living whole rather than a machine, and thought the ultimate reality (the Absolute) could be an open, developing process, not a finished system. Language, history, and culture mattered: ideas and values grow out of particular languages and traditions, and poetry helps disclose truths ordinary concepts miss. Romantics disliked rigid, all-encompassing systems and preferred fragmentary, ironic, or conversational forms that admit limits and openness. They also stressed individual creativity, spiritual longing, and a return to religious or mystical feeling.
Influence
The Athenäum’s ideas spread through later thought by shifting attention from pure reason to imagination, history, and language. Its use of fragments and irony encouraged a style of writing and thinking that accepts incompleteness and self‑reflection. This influenced poets and novelists who used breakable forms and experimental techniques. By treating art as a way of knowing, it helped shape debates in aesthetics and made thinkers take artistic insight seriously.
Its stress on historical context and cultural particularity fed into the idea that understanding is shaped by history and its focus on the creative, self‑forming subject anticipated themes in existentialism and phenomenology. Finally, by challenging Enlightenment trust in neutral reason and highlighting the role of language and imagination, the Athenäum provided tools later used by critical theory and post‑structuralism. Its interest in national traditions also influenced 19th‑century cultural and political movements.
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